Life ex­pectancy in the US con­tin­ues to fall, CDC re­ports

LIFE ex­pectancy in the United States de­clined again in 2017, the gov­ern­ment said Thurs­day in a bleak se­ries of re­ports that showed a na­tion still in the grip of es­ca­lat­ing drug and sui­cide crises.

The data con­tin­ued the longest sus­tained de­cline in ex­pected life span at birth in a cen­tury, an ap­palling per­for­mance not seen in the United States since 1915 to 1918. That four-year pe­riod in­cluded World War I and a flu pan­demic that killed 675,000 peo­ple in the United States and per­haps 50 mil­lion world­wide.

Pub­lic health and de­mo­graphic ex­perts re­acted with alarm to the re­lease of the Cen­ters for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion’s an­nual sta­tis­tics, which are con­sid­ered a re­li­able barom­e­ter of a so­ci­ety’s health. In most de­vel­oped na­tions, life ex­pectancy has marched steadily up­ward for decades.

Over­all, Amer­i­cans could ex­pect to live 78.6 years at birth in 2017, down a tenth of a year from the 2016 es­ti­mate, ac­cord­ing to the CDC’S Na­tional Cen­ter for Health Sta­tis­tics. Men could an­tic­i­pate a life span of 76.1 years, down a tenth of a year from 2016. Life ex­pectancy for women in 2017 was 81.1 years, un­changed from the pre­vi­ous year. Drug over­doses set an­other an­nual record in 2017, crest­ing at 70,237 - up from 63,632 the year be­fore, the gov­ern­ment said in a com­pan­ion re­port.